How Can I Market My Architecture Visualization Business?

We are a team of ten talented artists. We started an architecture visualization firm, Vivendi Media Works (http://www.vivendimediaworks.com) in our home city of Chennai, India. We are facing a lack not of skill but of marketing ideas. Please help us to develop our business.

The word "visualization" is your first clue. As soon as I read your question, I thought, "This is perfect for Pinterest." In case you are not familiar with it, Pinterest is a social bookmarking site where users create a variety of visual pinboards and post images organized around topics of their choice. It’s the third-largest network after Facebook and Twitter and has over 10 million users. Pinterest’s focus on design and décor makes it a natural fit for firms such as yours that inherently deal in visually rich content. Here are a few tips from the new book Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business on how to make Pinterest work for you.

Promote your specialty.
Does your firm have a particular area of expertise? If so, feature it. For example, if green architecture or design is where you excel, create a specific Pinterest board for that and pin pictures of eco-friendly home products and energy-efficient designs. If your area of expertise is small spaces, build boards that highlight your best examples and provide small-space architectural tips. Be sure to use keywords in your descriptions of the pins so that potential clients searching for what you offer can easily find you.

Segment by spaces.
Pinterest users are always on the lookout for beautiful or interesting images of interiors to pin. Instead of lumping them all together on one board, try segmenting them out by room or functional space. For example, Christopher Architects has individual boards for studies, dining rooms, bedrooms, baths and even foyers and closets.

Encourage visitors to contribute.
Open boards allow users to pin images of their favorite living spaces and even pictures from their own homes. A collaborative board not only helps create engagement with your audience but provides you with insight into what is resonating with potential clients.

Use Pinterest on your iPad for presentations.
Instead of pulling out a manila file folder crammed with a jumbled mass of photographs, download the Pinterest app to your iPad and use your boards to present your best ideas. This method has the advantage of showing clients a much broader range of design options and allows you to instantly narrow down and focus on the boards that resonate the most.

Just remember that if you really want your Pinterest efforts to have an impact on the overall marketing of your business, you need to cross-promote with your other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This means putting a "Follow Me on Pinterest" button on your website, posting your pins to Twitter and placing a "Pin It" button on your website so that visitors can easily pin your images to their own Pinterest boards.